The candidates were very much the same people they were in the first debate. The recent revelations about Trump’s conversation with Billy Bush didn’t seem to affect his style at all. He was just as aggressive and just as disorganized as he was previously. Tonight’s performance won’t do as much damage to his campaign as his performance in the first debate did, but he needed far more than that to actually move the race back in his favor.

Seth Masket is the chairman of the political science department at the University of Denver and the author of “The Inevitable Party.”

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Hillary Clinton shadowed by Donald Trump during the second presidential debate.Credit
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Donald J. Trump prowled the stage last night, frowning, pacing, looming over Hillary Clinton. When he wasn’t walking, he gripped the back of his chair, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet.

She, meanwhile, placed herself right in front of him, moving close to her questioners, trying to lock gazes with them and project empathy. She was largely stone-faced when he spoke, except when she allowed a few smiles of undisguised disdain.

They jabbed at each other, in their very different ways.

He threatened her and hurled accusations, his words matching his posture. Did he get caught on a video boasting about how he forced himself on women because a star can do whatever he wants? No, her husband is worse, and Mr. Trump paraded the women to prove it.

He’s accused of stirring up hatred with his attacks on Muslims, Mexicans, a reporter with a disability, an American war hero’s family? No, Hillary Clinton is full of hate. When he’s president, he’ll put her in jail. She stayed largely calm as he resurrected the humiliation of so many years ago, like a mother holding on to her temper when a child acts out. But she also tried to needle him with her attacks on his fitness, and succeeded in prompting a torrent of interruptions.

Each of their gender strategies carried risks. Mrs. Clinton had to look above it all, a woman fit to be commander in chief and a woman who had risen above her husband’s betrayal. Yet in her containment, she often passed up opportunities to land blows.

He risked looking like a bully, physically towering above her, cutting her off and reminding voters of the contempt he has so often displayed to other women.

But he had prepared better this time and was armed with far more facts in addition to bluster.

What a spectacle this election has been, in which ideas about gender have been resuscitated, reinforced and rebutted. We have a man whose affairs played out in public attacking a woman who stayed married to a man whose affairs were public.

We have a woman simultaneously trying to project warmth and power. Men are supposed to be rational and women emotional, but in most of this campaign those roles have been reversed. We have a man who prides himself on his conquest of women who needs to win women’s votes in key swing states.

The music is speeding up, and it’s getting harder to keep up with this dance.

Susan Chira is a senior correspondent and editor on gender issues for The New York Times.

In Sunday night’s presidential debate, Donald J. Trump told Hillary R. Clinton, “if I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation.”

When Ms. Clinton responded, “it’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country,” Mr. Trump intoned, “Because you would be in jail.”

It was a breathtaking moment in American history that a candidate for president would threaten to jail his opponent. This is exactly the kind of vengeance against political enemies that led the colonists to break free from Britain in 1776 and that today we associate with authoritarian regimes in less developed parts of the world.

As a federal prosecutor for 17 years, during both Democratic and Republican administrations, I never heard anything approaching Mr. Trump’s assault on the nonpartisan principle that there is no room for politics in criminal prosecutions.

In August 2000, I was the newly appointed chief of the Justice Department’s environmental crimes section, and a federal grand jury was investigating Koch Industries and Koch Petroleum Group for possible criminal violations of the Clean Air Act. As Republicans gathered in Philadelphia to nominate Texas Gov. George W. Bush, rumors swirled that the Clinton Justice Department would indict the Koch companies that week to embarrass Governor Bush.

At the Justice Department, we reacted to the news reports with bewilderment. We had no idea who the Koch brothers were or that they would become such pivotal figures in American politics. But even if we had known, it would have made no difference. Politics should never influence decisions about prosecutions.

Federal prosecutors have enormous power, none greater than their unfettered ability to conduct criminal investigations and to pursue criminal charges. The decision to prosecute can destroy lives, even when charges are later dismissed or when a jury acquits the defendant. Even the existence of a criminal investigation and the threat of criminal prosecution can irreparably damage reputations.

For that reason, there are few principles more sacred to the rule of law than the understanding that we should never politicize criminal prosecution and never deploy criminal charges as a political weapon. It is shocking that former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, both of whom were United States attorneys, have argued as surrogates for Mr. Trump that Mrs. Clinton should be prosecuted. As former prosecutors, they know better.

I served under both Democratic and Republican presidents, all of whom assiduously stood by the principle that law enforcement should never be used for political purposes. In a time-honored approach, the White House is not allowed to contact prosecutors about cases they are handling, and neither is the Congress.

Prosecutors must make their decisions based solely on the law and the facts, tempered only by their obligation to do justice for our citizens.

No president should ever use the Justice Department to attack political opponents. No principle is more fundamental to how we ensure the integrity of our democracy.

David M. Uhlmann, a law professor at the University of Michigan, was chief of the environmental crimes section at the Justice Department from 2000 to 2007.

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A Trump supporter in Nevada expressing his opinion.Credit
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

That statement from Donald J. Trump came right after Hillary Clinton expressed her relief that someone with Mr. Trump’s temperament was not in charge of the law in the United States. The line played well with some of the audience in St. Louis last night, but it really caught fire the other place I was watching: among Mr. Trump’s Twitter faithful.

For more than a year, I have checked a list of Trump supporters on Twitter nearly every day, to see what animated and moved them. I found them as they retweeted Mr. Trump or one of his high-profile supporters approvingly. The target of the day on Trump twitter moves between Mrs. Clinton and Republicans whom they consider insufficiently supportive of Mr. Trump.

I had been watching last night’s debate the way I’ve been watching all of them this year, with my social media feeds divided into columns on my computer screen: one with the Trump supporters, another with many academics and journalists, another with people around the world.

Everyone lit up at the “jail” moment. Academics were aghast that a presidential candidate would threaten to jail a political opponent. People from other countries yelped with recognition. Was a tactic common in authoritarian states making its way to the United States?

But it was the Trump supporters who responded most forcefully, exploding with glee. The “memes” started immediately: Mrs. Clinton behind bars; Mr. Trump with cool sunglasses enjoying his triumph. Mr. Trump giving Mrs. Clinton a striped jail suit as a debate souvenir. An orange “Trump Card,” fashioned like the one in the board game Monopoly, titled “Go Directly to Jail” with Mrs. Clinton being dragged away.

During the debate, Trump supporters on Twitter alternated between getting angry at the moderators, who they thought were biased, cheering on Mr. Trump, and wondering if Mrs. Clinton would have a seizure on camera, even noting every time she sat down. Conspiracies about her health have not died down.

But it was that comment about the jail that dominated the conversation for the rest of the night and is still going strong this morning. “Jail her!” is the collective cry. It’s not an actual policy statement as much as an entertaining fiction. It’s in fact the logical outcome of a political strategy not based on policy differences but on delegitimizing President Obama, and now Hillary Clinton. The Republican establishment has used this strategy to cover over the fact that a substantial chunk of its base does not share its pro-big business, small government politics.

“Jail her!” is a catchy phrase though. Maybe “Jail Her!” will be part of the prime time line up on Trump TV. Mr. Trump can host, gleefully going after the ratings he loves.

There was a cascade of high-level Republican defections over the weekend, after a tape revealed Mr. Trump making predatory comments about women in 2005. For the past year, Mr. Trump has made deeply derogatory comments about women, immigrants, Muslims, federal judges, wives and family members of his Republican opponents, and no one objected too much. But this old video allowed some Republicans to try to unmoor themselves from his sinking electoral ship.

Trump Twitter reacted to these defections not with cries of betrayal, but an affirmation that Republicans needed new leadership that really represented them: the Trump loyalists, the base.

Mr. Trump’s impending loss will be attributed, alternatively, to Hillary Clinton’s stealing the election and the G.O.P. leadership’s knifing Mr. Trump in the back, and both topics will surely be visited nightly on “Jail Her!”

Zeynep Tufekci is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina School of Information and Library Science and a contributing opinion writer.

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Did Trump essentially say that he didn’t actually say the things we all heard him say?

Last night, Donald J. Trump did what he has been doing for the whole campaign, and to great effect: He made vague promises and dark allusions. He assured Americans that he alone has mastered the mysteries of governance: the free-market formula that will fix our byzantine health care system; the “extremely complex” tax code. He knows the secrets of the Clinton campaign, too: “I know many of her donors,” he told us, and they “took massive deductions,” but of course, “I won’t mention their names.”

How can people fall for this? Conspiracy-mongering and pseudo-expertise are, of course, ancient political techniques. But we can find a helpful precedent in an unexpected place. In his blend of brash populism and gnostic claims to the secret knowledge that runs the universe, Mr. Trump has mastered the technique of 19th-century prophecy preachers.

Mr. Trump seems certain that he, himself, is the Messiah, so I doubt he has much use for prophecies concerning the Second Coming. Still, he reminds me of preachers like the Anglo-Irish evangelist John Nelson Darby, who came to the United States in the 1860s to peddle a complicated method of reading the Bible as a codebook. Many scriptural verses had what he called a “double character,” a “language of symbols.” Those who cracked the code could map prophecy onto geopolitics to reveal God’s hidden intentions in world wars, the identities of leaders who might be the Antichrist or the Beast, and — most important — to discern when Christ himself would show up to battle Satan and his forces.

The genteel theologians of the elite seminaries scoffed at Darby and his followers — just as the liberal elites today scoff at Mr. Trump. If the internet had existed in the 19th century, they would have set up a Bible fact-checking website and pedantically directed their followers to it, as Hillary Clinton did last night.

Yet Darby’s ideas spread like wildfire. The liberal elites asked then, as they do now: How can this be?

Darby, like Mr. Trump, had a genius for giving people with little education and a lot of grievance a sense of control in a chaotic world. The late 19th century was a time — like today — when native-born white Americans worried about their eroding cultural authority and the growing diversity of their country. Modern capitalism was squeezing out old ways of life.

Darby’s message was, in essence: Yes, you’re right, the world is going to hell, and I’m the one who really understands why. All those theologians with fancy degrees and politicians who look down on you, who think they’re running the world — they’re frauds. They don’t get it, but I do. If you join me, you’ll join the remnant of the saved, the few “who have ears to hear.”

Darby was savvy. He never made the mistake of predicting a date for Jesus Christ’s return, a concrete fact that might, eventually, hold him accountable to reality.

Last night, as Mr. Trump paced around and evaded the moderators’ follow-up questions on his health care plan, tax reforms and foreign policy, he confirmed that he, too, understands that a prophet must avoid too much precision. For his supporters, dark divinations are more powerful than facts.

Molly Worthen (@MollyWorthen) is the author, most recently, of “Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism,” an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a contributing opinion writer.

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Donald Trump was on the attack at the debate on Tuesday in Missouri.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times

With his campaign imploding and Republican lawmakers defecting, Donald Trump decided that his goal in Sunday night’s debate was to reassure his base of supporters. He did that by attacking Hillary Clinton with a ferocity that is quite rare in modern American politics. His supporters were thrilled, and as a result, Trump probably kept his campaign from capsizing.

The problem for Trump’s presidential aspirations is that only a small percentage of Americans visit The Drudge Report and Breitbart.com a dozen times a day. Trump, in playing to that embittered and habitually inflamed audience, succeeded in further alienating the rest of America. (It didn’t help that Trump wandered around the stage, sometimes looking like a stalker and at other times like a disoriented man in a crosswalk.)

Trump did score some points — he seemed somewhat more focused than in the past — and Clinton wasn’t as consistently sharp and effective as she was in the first debate. But she certainly did better than he did, and Clinton won the key moments, which may matter more since debates are often won or lost because of the encounters and exchanges that are endlessly replayed.

More fundamentally, Sunday’s debate will reinforce many of the worst impressions Americans have of Trump — that he is rude, volatile and emotionally unstable. It’s hard to imagine anyone who was not already in Trump’s corner being won over by anything he said or did during the debate. And when you’re losing decisively, as Trump now is, the failure to win converts is a problem.

Trump did well enough to keep his campaign from blowing apart, but he didn’t do nearly well enough to get it back on track. During the next four weeks, it will help voters make sense of his conduct if they understand that Trump, a former reality television star, is no longer chiefly interested in running for president. He’s auditioning for his next entertainment gig. On Sunday night, he was thinking of his brand rather than his campaign, his future audience share rather than his electoral vote count.

The fact that he’s ruined the Republican Party in the process didn’t seem to bother him at all.

Peter Wehner served in the last three Republican administrations and is a contributing opinion writer.

Hillary Clinton is running against a man who threatens to use presidential power to put her in jail. A man who brags about committing sexual assault, openly admits to not paying taxes, and tenaciously supports the kleptocrat Vladimir Putin.

And yet, every time Trump lied, made a threat, or loomed behind her in a menacing way in the debate last night, she smiled. Her eyes widened with incredulity, they crinkled, and she grinned. What people saw, though, wasn’t amusement. It was sarcasm and contempt. That smile had some gotcha in it, and a hint of fear. It felt fake, and I’m sure it made people distrust her.

She should not be smiling. None of us should. We are facing the abyss.

I know all the arguments about the double standard for women, how if you don’t smile, you come off as grim, bitchy, mean. All women have been trapped in that bind, that damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t, for most of our lives. Maybe the smile is automatic, a tic.

She needs to quash it. To fire the media trainers who tell her to be relatable. To stop trying to be likable. We need her to be serious. Neither Tim Kaine nor Mike Pence smiled during their debate. Trump did nothing but scowl, and everyone says he did better than expected. I don’t believe Angela Merkel would smile on that stage, or Theresa May, or Nicola Sturgeon.

A good leader channels her followers’ emotions; she doesn’t try to ingratiate herself with them. It seems clear to me that Clinton will be a good, maybe even a great, leader. But first, she needs to show us that she understands the gravity of the situation. She needs to help us bear our anxiety. Someone has to tell her: Don’t smile.

Judith Shulevitz is the author of “The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time” and a contributing opinion writer.

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Kellyanne Conway in the spin room following the second presidential debate.Credit
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Long before she was Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway was known in political circles for a catchphrase: “marriage, munchkins, mortgage and mutual funds.” It’s not as memorable as Trump’s “You’re fired,” but it represented a powerful argument: Women who were liberal when young would become more conservative — and become reliable Republican voters — as they formed families and became homeowners and investors.

In recent elections, that theory has often been borne out. The Democratic advantage among unmarried women has widened with each presidential election, while Republican appeals about economic and personal security pulled older and married voters toward the G.O.P. The fearmongering about the Islamic State and the Ebola virus in the 2014 election, in which turnout was lower and older, married voters played a bigger role, revived the “security mom” archetype from the mid-2000s.

One of the biggest political questions about 2016 and beyond has been whether the millennial cohort of unmarried women who supported President Obama by overwhelming margins would develop a party loyalty that would hold as they aged. Or, alternatively, would they move to the right, as previous generations had? (Many observers have argued, without evidence, that people who voted for the same party in their first two or three elections would become permanently aligned to that party.)

Will the 24-year-old Obama supporter of 2008 still be as progressive now that she’s a 32-year-old, possibly with some or all of Ms. Conway’s four M’s? Given how stable many of our political alignments are otherwise — for example, white men, married and unmarried, vote heavily Republican — a great deal of the political future depends on that question.

Donald Trump’s long-term impact on American politics might be to resolve that question strongly in favor of the idea that women will remain progressive and loyal Democrats, whether or not they marry and have children. While Trump was clearly working from Conway’s playbook in last night’s debate, invoking the Islamic State at every turn and building his appeal on the politics of fear, it was overwhelmed by news about his attitudes and behavior toward women, reinforced by his hulking, menacing presence behind Clinton during much of the debate.

That 32-year-old may not be all that enthusiastic about Hillary Clinton — after all, Clinton first moved into the White House when that voter was 8 — but she’s also likely to be unmoved by names like Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey, footnotes from another era and irrelevant to issues such as child care, job stability and climate change that worry voters with families today, regardless of gender.

Conway’s theory had a good run. But the candidate she staked her career to may have finished it off.

Mark Schmitt is the director of the political reform program at New America.

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Hillary Clinton at the debate on Tuesday.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times

I very much appreciated having the question on the screen during the candidates’ responses last night, because it showed how far and how quickly each candidate strayed from the questions themselves and moved into what sounded like scripted answers. Hillary Clinton at least did this with sophistication, transitioning to her talking points logically and elegantly most of the time.

But Donald J. Trump did this in a clumsy, erratic way, speaking mostly in fragments — tossing out buzzwords without knowing how to string them together as cohesive thoughts. Yes, you might be able to see the scaffolding with Mrs. Clinton, but at least she seems aware of the question hovering at the bottom of the screen. At least the moderator did not have to restate the question multiple times in order to get her even close to answering it, as was necessary with Mr. Trump.

But needing the question at the bottom of the screen underscores how difficult this debate was to follow. I’d been optimistic that the town hall format would mean fewer interruptions, fewer chances for bullying on the part of Mr. Trump.

I was wrong. He spent the night wandering around stage, taking up as much space as he could, interrupting her both visually and with his words. He’s the student in class who doesn’t do the reading but insists on leading his discussion group — the student who also eventually wants to discuss his grade and ask why you “gave” him a low one.

“I’m sorry I have to keep saying this,” Mrs. Clinton kept saying after Mr. Trump wandered away from the questions right in front of us, from logic. We’ve come to the point where a candidate has to apologize for trying to keep a debate centered on policy, on facts, on the actual questions being asked. She is not the one who needed to apologize to the American people.

Jennine Capó Crucet is the author of the novel “Make Your Home Among Strangers” and an assistant professor of English and ethnic studies at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.

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Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump at the close of the second presidential debate.Credit
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Donald Trump is a walking example of why it is a really bad idea to let people bring their guns into a bar. He showed himself, once again, to be a rambling, swaggering bully. Listening to him for an hour and a half is like being hit on the head constantly by a rubber hammer — or listening to a classic tavern drunk, full of bluster and bluff, plentiful exclamations and very few facts. To saddle this barstool blatherer up with the full force of the greatest military in the history of the world is to beg for one of Mr. Trump’s favorite words: “disaster.”

This debate was — what a surprise — a sad spectacle, one in which, for all of his repeated claims that he would be the president of everybody, Donald Trump doubled down with his base, repeating all of right-wing radio’s talking points: emails, conspiracy theories, Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi.

No doubt, Trump will be seen as doing much better than last time, and probably winning this debate, simply because he was able to stay more focused, slip in more zingers, and hit more catchphrases. The many television commentators, who have served us so badly throughout this election season, will judge him on these points and not on his constant lies, shameless distortions (“I was against the war in Iraq”), messianic pretensions (“Captain Khan would be alive today if I’d been president”), relentless working of the refs, occasional advertisements for himself (“the Old Post Office!”) and incessant calamity howling about how the United States is about to fall completely apart thanks to urban crime, or debt, or Islamic terrorists, or the sad, sad fact that Muammar el-Qaddafi is no longer among the living.

Perhaps the worst part was that, during the warmest fall in recorded history, there was not a single question on climate change, and only one on energy, at the very end of the debate. Just the same old trivia that has dominated the last year and a half of this interminable campaign. We, the media, have failed the country in this election. But then, the people themselves, left to ask the questions tonight, didn’t do much better.

Kevin Baker is an essayist and the author, most recently, of the historical novel “The Big Crowd.”

The more this debate continued, the more we saw how little Donald J. Trump knows. As he did in the first debate, he is never able to speak in specifics. He thinks that if he blurts out key words and insults, that will be enough to reach undecided voters. Instead, he is speaking only to his base, making them froth with even more hatred. A debate is designed to allow us to learn more about the candidates. Tonight we’ve learned or been reminded that Mr. Trump doesn’t know how American governance works — assuming that alone, as one senator, Hillary Clinton could impose her will upon the entire Congress and the Republican president at the time.

He is unfamiliar with where America’s tax rate stands in a global context. He has no understanding of what it would take to ensure that all Americans can receive health care without a federal mandate. He has no understanding of international relations and the travesty that is taking place in Syria or what the word “humanitarian” means. The list goes on, and on. It is crystal clear that a Trump presidency would lead both the United States and the rest of the world into a dystopia the likes of which even the darkest of novelists cannot fathom.

Hillary Clinton is dealing with a unique challenge — having to stay sharp with an incompetent opponent. She managed to remain on message throughout the debate. She offered several specifics while always clearly demarcating the difference between her and Mr. Trump. She demonstrated grace under pressure. And in the end, when asked to say something positive about her opponent, she reminded us of just how much she outclasses Mr. Trump as a political candidate. She complimented his children despite how easy and satisfying it would have been to say the truth — that no, there is nothing commendable about Donald Trump.

Roxane Gay is an associate professor at Purdue University, the author of “Bad Feminist” and the forthcoming “Hunger,” and a contributing opinion writer.

My sister, Peggy, knew she wasn’t voting for Hillary, despite the fact that they both started as Goldwater girls. But could my favorite member of the “basket of deplorables,’’ as I like to call her, vote for Trump?

She has been going back and forth on it for a year, vertiginous with the vicissitudes of trying to be a Republican in the Year of Trump.

She jumped off the Trump train whenever he said offensive things and when he retweeted an unflattering picture of Heidi Cruz, but tentatively came back when he apologized for that picture, after I told Trump that he had lost her vote.

But Peggy wanted to stick with the Republican Party. She was still considering voting for Trump when she watched the first debate and he started his week-long meltdown over Alicia Machado, including crazed 3 a.m. tweets on a possible sex tape, and he lost her again.

“I’ve been waiting for him to grow up,’’ she told me tonight. “At the debate I saw how Hillary needled him and got under his skin and after all these months, if he hasn’t been able to control that, I don’t feel that he’d be able to control it in the White House.

“I’ve always hated fat-shaming of women and to watch him do that is sickening. It’s disgusting. He’s sending the wrong message to young women in this country.”

She decided he was so erratic he belonged in St. Elizabeths, the mental institution in D.C.

She came over to my house to watch the second town hall debate tonight, her mind still roiling about her vote. She did not consider the “Access Hollywood” tape a deal-breaker about returning to Trump.

“I think it was disgusting but it was more bluster,’’ she said. “He wanted to seem like ‘the guy’ with Billy Bush. I still believe in my heart that half of what he says and does is just bravado to make him look bigger and better. Somewhere along the line, he got an inferiority complex. He’s all mixed up.

“I get when he says it was ‘locker-room talk.’ I have been a jock all my life. I have been around jocks and sports players and male friends. You’re around this element and you hear this language. Not all men, but the majority of men participate.”

But she was not optimistic about Trump’s ability to be contrite and humble in the debate and explain the vulgar Billy Bush tape. And when the video of Trump’s bizarre St. Louis press conference before the debate with several of the women accusing Bill Clinton of sexual assault hit the Internet, Peggy thought that was a “totally high school move” by Trump.

“I think it will cause women to feel sympathetic to Hillary,’’ Peggy said, shaking her head. “It will remind them of what she’s had to go through with Bill. Bill is not running for office. Maybe Hillary did enable at some point, but I think that was for survival. When she was defending Bill in the beginning, he was denying it. When she pulled that Right Wing Conspiracy stuff, she really believed his lies, that he had never been involved.”

Then we watched the debate, as the vultures circled on both sides of the aisle, trying to figure out if Trump could survive the night or if he would be dumped by the morrow.

“I think he did really well,’’ Peggy said. “He has done what the Republicans criticized him for not doing in the first debate, attacking her on Libya and the emails. He kept his voice calm even when he criticizes her. I like the way he walked around to stay in the picture when Hillary was talking. I think Christie and Rudy have prepared him better. He didn’t interrupt her on every sentence and he seems like he’s more aware of what’s going on. He even seemed to know where Aleppo is. He made good points that energy is under siege in the Obama Administration and that she wants to put coal miners out of work.’’

When Trump chastised Hillary for calling his supporters “deplorable” and “irredeemable,’’ Peggy called out “Good boy!”

In the end, my conservative sister concluded: “I could see him as president.’’

Even though I was supposed to be following and commenting on this debate, my reaction was mostly sticking my fingers in my ears and going LA LA LA LA LA.

The substance of the debate clearly indicated that Americans have a choice, but the tone of the debate proved, ironically, Mr. Trump’s comment: “I love depreciation.” The United States, the American brand, has depreciated as a result of this race and these debates. Mr. Trump bears great responsibility for that, but so do Americans collectively for buying into our reality-show culture. That culture masks the hollowing out of the American economy, the increasing levels of desperation that are displaced onto howling debates about who belongs or doesn’t belong in America.

Mrs. Clinton, in style, is more reassuring than Mr. Trump about inclusiveness, and is more optimistic about the American dream. One could say that Mr. Trump has dragged her into a mud fight. But Mr. and Mrs. Clinton have helped to set up the crises we face domestically and internationally. The debates, and Mr. Trump’s character, distract us from undiscussed issues ranging from mass incarceration to drone strikes. While both candidates praised America’s goodness and greatness, we should be concerned that the rest of the world — and many Americans — may not be persuaded by this rhetoric of American exceptionalism. As Mr. Trump says, “It’s only words.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen is the author, most recently, of “Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War.”

The candidates were very much the same people they were in the first debate. The recent revelations about Trump’s conversation with Billy Bush didn’t seem to affect his style at all. He was just as aggressive and just as disorganized as he was previously. Tonight’s performance won’t do as much damage to his campaign as his performance in the first debate did, but he needed far more than that to actually move the race back in his favor.

Seth Masket is the chairman of the political science department at the University of Denver and the author of “The Inevitable Party.”

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The candidates faced off at the debate in Missouri.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times

This is perhaps the most important question for the future of America. We have a polarized, fractured country in which the middle has been hijacked by extremists, opportunists and reality-TV stars. Our own presidential candidates can’t even shake each other’s hand in this debate. There’s no opportunity or desire for healing because there are no votes in it for Donald J. Trump. Absolutism blinds us to nuances and gray areas — it’s all or nothing, black or white, patriot or hater of America, believer or infidel, with us or against us.

In this campaign, Hillary Clinton has at least offered olive branches to unite diverse segments of this country. She brought Khizr Khan and his wife on stage at the Democratic National Convention, introduced by Kareem Abdul Jabbar. She’s talking to Muslims and African Americans and Latinos and women. Meanwhile, Donald J. Trump says he will help heal the divides by barring Muslims, calling Mexicans rapists, kicking out undocumented immigrants, calling women pigs and tweeting hate against anyone who trolls him.

Yet in the “basket of deplorables” are many Americans who feel left behind.

Many of Mr. Trump’s voters say they aren’t racist or even inherently anti-Muslim, but they are known as “disaffected Americans.” They feel this country no longer belongs to them. This is no longer the America they recognize. This is not their father’s or grandfather’s America. Things are changing too fast, and they are losing out. No one is looking out for them. Elites laugh at them and talk down to them. They are seen as the perpetual villains for being white, Christian, male, heterosexual and middle class. They feel that the privilege everyone talks about has not benefited them one iota. The American Dream for them has become a rainbow-colored nightmare.

Mr. Trump deliberately uses their frustration. He combines it with fear, hate and ignorance, and creates an explosive cocktail used against minorities in order to gain votes and profit.

It’s up to us, including myself, to perhaps offer an olive branch to them. I just hope I won’t have to give it from inside a detention camp.

Wajahat Ali is the author of the play “The Domestic Crusaders” and creative director of Affinis Labs, a hub for social entrepreneurship and innovation.

Donald J. Trump went into a short foray about drug lords and drug trafficking, spinning off a question about Syrian refugees. Having covered this important issue for years, I find it refreshing to see it even mentioned in the debate. But Mr. Trump got his facts wrong and made a misleading argument.

He said, “We are also letting drugs pour through our southern border at a record clip.”

This is not true. The amount of marijuana being seized on the southern border, which far outweighs the other drugs, has gone down from 2.5 million pounds in 2011 to 1.5 million pounds last year.

That is most likely because of the legalization of marijuana for recreational or medicinal use in a growing number of American states – so Americans are buying more cannabis grown in the United States.

The amount of cocaine being seized has also gone down over the last two decades – most likely because of a decline in the crack cocaine use in American inner cities.

However, the amount of heroin and crystal meth being seized on the border has gone up in recent years – but again probably because of changes in the patterns of American drug consumption rather than a weakness in border security.

Mr. Trump also made a curious case that nations refuse to receive deported drug lords.

As he said: “We have many criminal illegal aliens, when we want to send them back to their country, their country says we don’t want them. In some cases, they’re murderers, drug lords.”

Actually, the United States works to extradite drug lords from nations, including Mexico and Colombia to serve prison time on American soil. When it does deport drug lords to these nations, there is no issue on their receiving them, such as this year when the convicted trafficker Jesus Hector “El Guero” Palma was deported to Mexico after serving a sentence.

Ioan Grillo is the author of “Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields and the New Politics of Latin America” and a contributing opinion writer.

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Donald Trump on Sunday night at the debate.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times

About 20 minutes into the debate, Donald Trump delivered a menacing threat to Hillary Clinton. “If I win,” he warned, “I’m going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation, because there’s never been so many lies, so much deception.”

Mr. Trump’s promising on national television to use the power of the president’s office to prosecute his chief political rival, to her face, was chilling enough.

But when Mrs. Clinton responded, Mr. Trump dropped the threat of an official investigation and any veneer of the rule of law.

“It’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country,” Mrs. Clinton observed.

“Because,” Mr. Trump replied “you’d be in jail.”

It’s hard to think of anything Mr. Trump could have said to more powerfully underscore the truth of Mrs. Clinton’s point. He said, in a widely watched televised presidential debate, that if he became president, he would put political opponents in cages. That’s dictator talk. But it’s not Mr. Trump’s open contempt for the norms of liberal democracy that made my blood run cold. It was the applause that came after. It is the fact that it’s no longer assured that you automatically lose a presidential debate in which you promise to jail your political rival.

Will Wilkinson is the vice president for policy at the Niskanen Center and a columnist at Vox.

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Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump facing off at the debate.Credit
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

One thing that is becoming clear is that Donald Trump — however much he claims to differ with Republican orthodoxy and advocates protectionism — has nothing to offer on key problems except the same old same old: Let the markets rip and all will be well.

On health insurance, the notion that deregulating and letting insurance companies compete across state lines would lower rates so much that everyone could afford care is just ludicrous. Before the A.C.A., California — a huge state, bigger than most countries in population and G.D.P. — had a very lightly regulated individual insurance market. The result: cheap policies for healthy young men, but people with any kind of pre-existing condition were shut out completely.

Obamacare has done enormous good for exactly the kind of people who were denied health insurance and essential care in the past. What does Trump — or anyone on the Republican side — offer these people in return for taking away all their hope?

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Donald Trump spoke about his relationship with Putin during the debate.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times

During the debate tonight, Hillary Clinton brought up the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russian hackers stole emails from the Democratic National Committee to influence the election to Trump’s benefit. Maybe, she said, that was because Trump has praised Putin so much.

“I don’t know Putin,” Trump said.

Then he added that nugget of truth. “I know nothing about Russia,” he said.

He quickly tried to correct himself: “I know about Russia, but I don’t know about the inner workings of Russia.”

Because, of course, our next president should be ignorant about the “inner workings” of one of the country’s most aggressive and dangerous adversaries. (As if to demonstrate his ignorance, Trump later said that Russia, Syria and Iran are aligned because of weak leadership by President Obama. Actually, they have been aligned for decades.)

Trump’s repeated praise of Vladimir Putin is truly bizarre, and quite unnerving, as are the many connections between some of his top advisers and the Kremlin.

Here’s what Trump doesn’t know about, or care about: Putin is an autocrat who seized territory in a sovereign nation, Ukraine. His military forces are murdering civilians in Syria every day in collusion with the Syrian dictator. There is nothing about him that should be admirable to an American presidential candidate.

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Donald Trump speaking at the debate.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times

Donald J. Trump has several times said “the Latinos Hispanics,” revealing that someone has, before tonight’s performance, said something to him about these labels and that they matter, but he’s neglected to understand the history behind either term.

I spent a good part of the first day of my Cuban-American literature course reviewing both terms and explaining their history, then asked my students to decide as a class which term we felt comfortable using while still acknowledging that both are imposed labels. Mr. Trump’s words are undermining our efforts as educators to help our students think critically about the words they use every day.

And if there’s any doubt as to how much words actually do matter, his rhetoric about immigration — the way he’s inciting fear and painting us all as criminals and “very bad people” — is what launched his campaign in the first place.

Jennine Capó Crucet is the author of the novel “Make Your Home Among Strangers” and an assistant professor of English and ethnic studies at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.

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Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump on the debate stage at Washington University in Missouri.Credit
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

American Muslims have entered the debate. I thought it might be an opportunity to see if our stories and experiences could be appreciated beyond the paralyzing, simplistic rubric of national security. But I was too optimistic.

Donald J. Trump, yet again, had an opportunity to reach out to three million of us who are your citizens and neighbors, your doctors, Uber drivers, fallen soldiers, students, tech support, and even DJ Khaled.

But that would require some humility and awareness. I appreciate that Mr. Trump acknowledges Islamophobia is a problem and a shame, but he has no problem fanning the flames of anti-Muslim bigotry to manipulate people’s fear and ignorance to gain votes and profits. Muslims’ only function is to “report” crimes, because apparently he hasn’t heard that 40 percent of violent extremist plots were thwarted due to proactive American Muslim outreach to law enforcement.

Mr. Trump won’t actually bar us from entering the country, thank God, but there will be extreme vetting. That clears it up. I assume it’ll be a new reality TV show where they make us eat bacon to see if we are moderate.

Hillary Clinton, at the very least, mentioned the contributions of Khizr Khan and Muhammad Ali, but even she can’t help using us as an instrument in the never-ending war on terror that has claimed the lives of thousands of innocent Muslims — the greatest victims of the Islamic State and Al Qaeda. We are to be the “eyes and ears” of an apparatus that sees us not as humans but as political props. However, Mrs. Clinton acknowledges our humanity and calls out Mr. Trump’s reckless security initiatives as counterproductive to our security.

I guess I’m grateful. But that’s not going to cut it anymore. I deserve more and I’ve earned it by virtue of being an American.

Wajahat Ali is the author of the play “The Domestic Crusaders” and creative director of Affinis Labs, a hub for social entrepreneurship and innovation.

“Repeal and replace,” the familiar Republican response to the Affordable Care Act, has always had a missing piece: “Replace.” Donald Trump tonight distilled it to the one tiny piece of a replacement that most A.C.A. opponents agree on. “Break the artificial lines around the states.” That is, allow insurance companies to sell policies across state lines, regardless of state regulations. This would break down the structures and markets that the states with the best coverage, such as Massachusetts, have built, letting insurance companies from less-regulated states come in under their own rules. But more remarkably, it’s in absolute contradiction to the doctrine of federalism, or state control, that most conservatives embrace, and that Trump embraced in the very next sentence, where he called for converting Medicaid to a block grant to states. It’s a policy absurdity, but not unique to Trump.

Mark Schmitt is the director of the political reform program at New America.

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The candidates addressing the debate audience on Sunday night.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times

I’m already tired of this debate. Let’s assume Americans, as a whole, are sane and will elect Hillary Clinton. If this assumption is false, then President Trump will become the Agent Orange of American politics, poisoning our country. If this assumption is true, it’s time to pivot toward contemplating the future under a second Clinton presidency.

Facing a testosterone-infused demagogue who is not a viable right-wing opponent, Mrs. Clinton is free to take the center-right position where she is most comfortable. She will support civil rights and placate portions of the Democratic Party. She may also support the corporations, trade agreements and tax structures that have gutted the middle class and privileged the economic elite across the ideological spectrum. She will almost certainly bomb foreign countries and kill nonwhite people, which is completely acceptable to both Democratic and Republican leadership.

The lurid spectacle of the debate is just a distraction from these fearful realities, which are completely possible in the “America is great” vision that unifies Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump. Rather than simply rejoice in witnessing Trump’s hubris, the left wing of the Democratic Party and beyond should begin thinking now about applying pressure to Mrs. Clinton to make sure she adheres to her promises.

Viet Thanh Nguyen is the author, most recently, of “Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War.”

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Donald Trump during the second presidential debate.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times

A presidential debate, during typical election years, offers an opportunity for people to gain a greater understanding of the presidential candidates and their positions. This year, however, is not a typical year. Each day, we see a new low in American politics. Each day we wonder, what will be the tipping point where any sort of tolerance for Donald J. Trump disappears. I don’t know that such a tipping point exists. For more than a year, Mr. Trump has campaigned on a platform of xenophobia, racism, white supremacy, and misogyny.

Only when video tape was leaked of Mr. Trump describing sexual assault and trying to make moves on a married white woman (as a married man), did Republicans begin to disavow their nominee. Tonight, before the debate, Mr. Trump held a press conference with three women who have accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault, harassment or unwanted advances, as if Bill Clinton and not Hillary Clinton were running for president. He found a new low and now we are all watching the debate not for political education. We are watching because it will, undoubtedly, be a spectacle. It will be a grotesquerie and we will all be lesser for being subjected to it.

Not too long into the debate, Hillary Clinton wisely raised what many people know — Donald J. Trump is unfit to serve as president. In typical, blustering fashion, while sniffing uncontrollably to punctuate each of his thoughts, Mr. Trump ignored the substance of what Mrs. Clinton had to say, thereby further demonstrating his lack of fitness to serve as president or a member of the human race. More than twenty minutes into the debate, Mr. Trump has only pivoted to his usual talking points — the Islamic State, the black people in the inner city, Bill Clinton’s misdeeds, and, of course, e-mail. Mr. Trump has no composure. He appears fatigued. He has no imagination or ability to demonstrate any sort of capability to govern the United States. More than anything, this debate, thus far, is a disgrace. This isn’t what a presidential race should look like.

Roxane Gay is an associate professor at Purdue University, the author of “Bad Feminist” and the forthcoming “Hunger,” and a contributing opinion writer.

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Donald Trump with Juanita Broaddrick, at a news conference before the second presidential debate.Credit
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Trump had a few quibbles about Clinton’s more catholic taste in women and his real estate bargaining skills.

How the friendship of the mighty had fallen.

The darkest, most lurid moment in modern debate history came just a few moments into the tense spectacle.

When Jeff from Ohio on Facebook asked about the “Access Hollywood” tape, Trump dived: “If you look at Bill Clinton, it’s far worse, mine were words, his were action. Never anybody in the history of this nation has been so abusive to women.”

Trump continued, saying that Hillary had attacked those same women “viciously” and that “four of them are here tonight.”

Trump, who was nervously pacing as Hillary was glaring, noted that President Clinton was impeached, lost his license to practice law and had to pay an $850,000 fine to Paula Jones.

When Hillary rebutted, noting that you had to fact-check Trump – which she did with a Freudian slip of “fat-check” – and that no one with Trump’s temperament should be in the Oval Office. Yes, Trump shot back, because if he was president, “you’d be in jail.”

The former friendship between Trump and the Clintons was dead, once and for all.

When I interviewed him in 1999, when Bill was a disgraced but still popular president and Donald was a not-yet-disgraced plutocrat toying with the idea of running for president, Trump said this: “He handled the Monica situation disgracefully. It’s sad because he would go down as a great president if he had not had this scandal. People would have been more forgiving if he’d had an affair with a really beautiful woman of sophistication. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe were on a different level. Now Clinton can’t get into golf clubs in Westchester. A former president begging to get in a golf club. It’s unthinkable.”

Trump also sniffed about the Clinton’s new Chappaqua house: “Very overpriced. I could have gotten him that house for $600,000 less.”

He was also unimpressed in those days with Ken Starr — “Starr’s a freak” — and Hillary’s Senate run. “The concept of the listening tour is ridiculous. People want ideas. Do you think Winston Churchill, when he was stopping Hitler, went around listening?”

But it was inevitable that Bill and Donald, larger-than-life figures who both became shooting stars in the ’80s, would find each other a decade and a half later when they were both living in New York.

Trump liked to be around powerful pols who might come in handy for business. And powerful pols liked to be around Trump, who might come in handy for donations.

And donate Trump did to the Clintons, both to the family foundation and to Hillary’s Senate campaign. Over the years, he seemed to come to genuinely like and admire both Bill and Hillary, in a transactional sort of way, praising them in public statements, making Bill a member of his Westchester golf course, inviting the Clintons to his third wedding, to Melania Knauss, a sultry Slovenian model.

During the 2008 Democratic primary, Trump blogged: “I know Hillary and I think she’d make a great president or vice president,” and in 2015, he told Joe Scarborough that Bill was his favorite president, even though he believed that Bill’s entanglements with “sundry semi-beautiful women” had dampened his success.

Up until he got in the race, Trump was friendly with the Clintons, even seeking Bill’s advice in a phone call not long before he jumped in.

But once Trump saw Hillary within his sights, the friendship ended. As far as Trump was concerned, the Clintons were the enemy, and Monica and other sordid tales from Clintonworld were, as Trump put it, “fair game.”

Last May, Trump began pummeling his former pals at a rally in Eugene, Ore. “Nobody in this country was worse than Bill Clinton with women. He was a disaster. I mean, there’s never been anybody like this and she was a total enabler. She would go after these women and destroy their lives. I mean, have you ever read what Hillary Clinton did to the women that Bill Clinton had affairs with? And they’re going after me with women. Give me a break, folks.”

At a rally in Fairfield, Conn., in mid-August, Trump brought up “that woman,” noting: “I’m so glad they kept that dress. It shows what the hell they are.”

Bill, who was still popular despite the rocky patches with Monica and the Marc Rich pardon, was angry when Trump began dragging back the old scandals over women into the spotlight.

After Trump began to slide, following his nutty focus on former Miss Universe, Alicia Machado, in the first debate, he ignored warnings from fellow Republicans and unleashed a scorpion attack on the Clintons’ treatment of women, directing surrogates to use this talking point: “Mr. Trump has never treated women the way Hillary Clinton and her husband did when they worked to destroy Bill Clinton’s accusers.”

At a New Hampshire rally a few days after the debate, Trump said: “The Clintons are the sordid past. We will be the very bright and clean future.”

When the scuzzy Billy Bush “Access Hollywood” tape was leaked, Trump first tried to brush it off as private “locker room banter.” Cornered, the pouty plutocrat lashed out, like a bag of raccoons. So in his initial statement to David Fahrenthold, who broke the story in The Washington Post, Trump immediately tried to shift blame, writing: “Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course — not even close.”

Trump had told me in an interview last June over lunch at Trump Tower that the two men had fun discussing women as they golfed.

But then the whole country got rabidly consumed and the press began covering the story as though a fiery orange comet was hitting the earth. The vice president tweeted that Trump was guilty of sexual assault, and Republicans began fleeing their nominee in droves, like “rats running across the tundra,” as the late, great Hunter Thompson used to say.

By Sunday, many Republicans and even the Wall Street Journal editorial board were saying Trump should think about dropping out, because as the paper said, “the goal has to be to save a G.O.P. Congress.”

So Trump went nuclear, in the sort of nuclear policy he understands. He held a news conference in St. Louis before the debate with Clinton accusers: Juanita Broaddrick, who claims Bill Clinton raped her; Paula Jones, who got a $850,000 settlement to drop a sexual harassment claim against Bill Clinton; Kathleen Willey, who claims that Clinton, as president, assaulted her when she was a White House volunteer; and Kathy Shelton of Arkansas, whose alleged rapist was defended by Hillary Rodham and had complaints about what she saw as Hillary’s subsequent lack of empathy.

Trump probably succeeded in rattling Hillary in the hour before the debate. But he also rattled Republicans, who found the scene desperate, dark and not exactly the shift to issues and contrition they were hoping for.

Unfortunately, the four things Trump needs to do well tonight are the four things he doesn’t have: empathy, impulse control, humility and genuine regret.

This post was updated to reflect developments during the debate.

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Donald Trump praying with church leaders last Wednesday in Las Vegas.Credit
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Despite everything that has happened over the past few days, or for that matter the last 15 months, there is one group that has been rock solid in its support of Donald Trump: religious conservatives.

Gary Bauer, Tony Perkins, the Rev. Robert Jeffress and Ralph Reed have all restated their support for Trump in light of the release of a videotape that shows him to be not only lewd but a sexual predator. “A ten-year-old tape of a private conversation with a talk show host ranks low on their hierarchy of concerns,” Reed said, about people of faith.

Immediately after the release of the videotape, Eric Metaxas, an influential Evangelical biographer and radio talk show host, decided to make light of the whole thing in a Tweet: “BREAKING: Trump caught using foul language, combing his hair oddly. Could this be the end of his campaign?” (Metaxas later deleted the tweet, claiming he was “unaware of the details” of the story, despite having tweeted about it.)

So this is what is distinctive about Christian involvement in American politics today: leading evangelical leaders standing by their man, regardless of how depraved and misogynistic he is. Those who for decades have spoken about the importance of character in public leaders, lamented the degraded state of our culture and worried about the human cost of the sexual revolution are the most reliable defenders of a man whose life is a moral cesspool.

Which raises this question before tonight’s debate: What could they possibly be listening for now? What could Trump do that would shake their support for him?

When Trump said last January, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” it was not yet clear that the group he could most rely on was religious conservatives.

But Trump’s repulsive videotaped conversation is not an aberration; it is instead the personification of his attitudes toward (among other things) women and wedding vows. It is only the latest link — and not the last one — in a long, ugly chain.

Some of us have been warning since shortly after Trump entered the campaign that this was what we could expect from him. Whatever else Trump can be faulted for, he did not hide who he was. The cruelty, the misogyny, the appeals to nativism and racism, the disordered personality were all on vivid display. And yet many Republicans simply shrugged. They deluded themselves and tried to delude others into believing this wasn’t who Trump really was. Or, if it was, they assured us that he would change. But Trump has stayed true to himself.

One other thing needs to be said. It is not as if evangelicals, in embracing Trump, did so because he was a committed and articulate advocate for the causes they care about most. Quite the opposite. Trump is a late and cynical convert to many causes that are important to them. It is a fantasy to pretend that as president he would expend effort on their behalf. Trump would betray them as he betrays everyone. The allegiance of Christian conservatives, and the hypocrisy it required, was won for virtually nothing in return.

If religious conservatives who still support him do end up abandoning him, it will be because of a power calculation — because they view him as an inevitable loser, not because they see him as an offense, as a person unworthy of their support and unfit to be president. At that point, their abandonment of Trump won’t much matter. The damage already done to them and their faith witness cannot be contained. We reap what we sow.

Peter Wehner served in the last three Republican administrations and is a contributing opinion writer.

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Out of the nine presidential campaigns I’ve covered, I’ve never seen anything as absurd as the motley crew of Trump advisers agonizing over how to delicately, in soothing tones, tiptoe up to the proudly uninformed megalomaniac and broach the topic of more rigorous debate prep.

One day, back in the late 50s, my father, flanked by my brother, was standing in the hall of the Capitol with a congressman and some of his staffers.

Mike Dowd, a strapping Catholic Washington D.C. police inspector born in County Clare, Ireland, was in charge of Senate security for 13 years and Michael, my oldest brother, was working his way through law school as a Capitol elevator operator.

Young Michael was a brainiac, with a Google memory before Google, who rarely lavished praise. But he always recounted that story about my dad with great pride.

Someone should have told Donald J. Trump long ago to go say a Hail Mary when he started to say something smutty. Maybe then, the cheesy and cheddar-colored billionaire wouldn’t be reaping the whirlwind tonight, figuring out how to throw a Hail Mary pass to save his teetering candidacy, shore up his cowering party and salvage whatever is left of his brand.

Trump has had an apocalyptic effect on the nation. Those who know him well describe being friends with “a hurricane.” And for 16 months, the Republican Party, Trump’s ever-shifting cast of advisers and at times, the media, have all been handcuffed to this hurricane.

He has changed everything about politics. There were some good things in the beginning, like when he turned over the golden apple cart of political hucksters, showing that you can make it without a lot of high-priced mercenaries and a couple hundred million dollars worth of negative ads.

But then came the avalanche of dreadful things: the bigotry, the xenophobia, the misogyny, the violence at rallies, the profane language, the vile epithets and uncontrollable vindictiveness. (I feel I got off easy being labeled merely a wacky, crazy, neurotic dope by Trump.)

This weekend was the Republican Party’s version of “Murder on the Orient Express:” a passel of lawmakers and other G.O.P. luminaries who have been insulted, belittled and politically undermined by Trump joining with lethal coordination to stick the knife in their indefensible nominee — death by a thousand cuts and defections.

But it will be hard for Republicans who waited this long to justify their cowardice in not distancing themselves sooner. The magnitude of the Republican Party’s “disgrace” is almost impossible to articulate, Steve Schmidt, who helped run John McCain’s campaign in 2008, said on “Meet the Press” today.

This year with Trump, he said, we have seen “these candidates who have repeatedly put their party ahead of their country, denying what is so obviously clear to anybody who’s watching about his complete and total, manifest unfitness for this office.”

As repulsive as the new tape is, with Trump giving Billy Bush his philosophy of pawing and pouncing, it is not a shocker.

Trump has always talked like a guy in a steam bath at the Sands Casino in Vegas in 1959. And he has always been surrounded by seamy enablers like Billy Bush, who insisted the poor soap opera actress meeting their bus give Trump a hug, even though Trump didn’t seem to want one any more than she did.

Trump’s defense, given to Robert Costa in Saturday’s Washington Post, sounded like it could have been a wintry Sinatra lament: “I’ve been here before, I’ll tell ya, in life. I understand life and how you make it through. You go through things. I’ve been through many. It’s called life. And it’s always interesting.” (In “That’s Life,” Sinatra sings, summing up Trump’s defiance: “I thought of quitting, baby, but my heart just ain’t gonna buy it.”)

Indeed, the braggart billionaire is blinking in shock that he is suddenly getting called on the carpet for the retrograde behavior he has exhibited his whole life – first as a real estate showboat, then as a TV star, and for the last year as a short-fingered vulgarian in over his head, trying – and failing – to morph into an even-keeled pol.

The Trumpster, as he calls himself, has always just been going for the roar of the crowd, first as a chauvinist pig with Howard Stern and then as an un-P.C. bigot with angry white voters. He always says he doesn’t see himself as a sexist or racist, not fathoming that you are what you say as you try to win the moment.

How on earth did we get to the ludicrous point where not one but two candy companies had to distance themselves from the Trump campaign? First Skittles, after Don Jr. crassly compared a bowl of Skittles to refugees, and then Tic Tacs, after Trump told Bush, as they went to promote a Trump cameo on “Days of Our Lives,” how he liked to pop some Tic Tacs before kissing women he found beautiful. (You know you’re in trouble as a groping Republican when Arnold Schwarzenegger distances himself.)

How on earth did we get to the preposterous place where Kelly Ayotte, a New Hampshire senator running for re-election, had to eat her own words calling the nominee of her party a role model?

In the end, Donald Trump’s legacy – aside from destroying the Republican Party, ensuring Hillary Clinton’s election and guaranteeing through his ego meltdowns that the first African-American president’s record is not erased by the first overtly racist candidate in modern times – may be hastening the coarsening of society. He presided over the merger of politics with social media, reality TV and wrestling extravaganzas.

Plus, he managed to change not one but two semantic policies of The New York Times. We began using the word “lie” about politicians who tell big fat whoppers. (If I could only tell you how many times I had to look up synonyms for “lie” when I was covering Dick Cheney’s heinous fictions justifying invading Iraq.)

And, in order to capture the creepy offense of the “Access Hollywood” open-mike tape, The Times felt it had to use some vulgarities for the first time in its 165-year history.

I have a message from my late dad for Donald J. Trump: As you make your Hail Mary pass tonight, when you think of diving into the gutter, say a Hail Mary.

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Donald Trump gesturing to a crowd at a campaign rally.Credit
Ian Thomas Jansen-Lonnquist for The New York Times

Have you, as a woman, faced treatment like Donald Trump describes? Have you, as a man, talked the way Donald Trump did, or listened to men talking that way? We asked readers to respond on Facebook. Here’s a sampling what they said, edited for length and clarity.

Have I? That’s like asking have I ever breathed air. I have been groped in public, been exposed to, demanded by married men that I should date them. Twice physically attacked in very scary ways. I’m not going into detail in a public forum. To hear this “locker room” excuse just infuriates me. Stop making excuses, this is reality everyday. Trump is a criminal.—Guinevere Shaw Smith

Um, as a man, yes. Spent 12 years in the Army with various deployments. If Trump’s comments offend you, don’t go to a military barracks, especially all male ones, on a weekend night.—Tom Barnes

I was pinched on the breast by a coworker who seemed to think it was funny. I was young and didn’t report the incident but I still remember the humiliation of 40-plus years ago.—Brenda Crosby Bouser

As a male who was raised by a strong and independent woman, I would like to respond to this. Have I spoken like this? Yes I have, when I was a teenage boy who had no experience with women in relationships, and as a very young adult in the military, who was “just trying to fit in”. As a kid I said these things before my mother corrected and taught me the concepts of respect and decency. That said, at 28 I would find it unacceptable to speak like this. By 70 years old, anyone who speaks like this proves what has already been said about him, he is a sexist narcissist who is only concerned with promoting himself, and that he has no respect for anybody but himself.—Tyrone Newsom

At the very least, there is probably not a woman alive who has not, to her own shame, used the “I have a boyfriend” excuse - because sometimes declaring yourself to be the property of another man is the only thing these cretins comprehend as a viable form of “no.”—Nancy Lloyd Van Whitbeck

I have never heard any comments like this over a lifetime of many different jobs. Not once.—Mark Scott

By the time I was eighteen this had happened many times. I never talked about it because I felt ashamed. It stopped happening in my 30’s so I guess it’s something mainly done to young women. I’m glad it’s identified as sexual assault now.—Lorraine Adler

I have never spoken about women the way Trump did. I have worked with women who spoke about men in “colorful” ways, but of course, they were feminists, and if men can use locker room speak then, by God, so could they.—Patrick Barbieri

I have not had the “pussy” grab, but trying to kiss me forcibly? Yes. My buttocks pinched/grabbed dozens of times. I don’t mind a whistle, but dirty, nasty comments as I walk past total strangers have made me nervous. I have a younger coworker that has received a “dick pic” from about 80% of the twenty somethings she has met. It starts in high school when the “boys” try to cop a cheap feel on your chest. I do not lament being a married, middle aged woman with children. I’m finally left alone.—Tara Murphy

I’ve heard men talk that way before when I was a member of a fraternity. I always rebuked them, and they never spoke that way in front of me again. I find it reprehensible, and I simply don’t tolerate it around me.—Erik Czerwin

The reality is nearly every woman has been sexually marginalized by a man or men at some point in her life. She has been objectified and had unwanted, uncomfortable cat-calls and whistles thrown at her, she has been demeaned because of her sex. She has had to work twice as hard as her male coworkers to be deemed half as good. She has been groped or touched without her consent, she has been told all she needs is a “good F___” to straighten out her attitude, she has had men unapologetically speak to her boobs.—Elizabeth Brandon Warner

As teens and young guys in college we would talk about girls but it was all about how sexy they were; “great legs”, “nice butt” , “big boobs” it was immature and stupid. In my entire life ( I am 71) I have never heard anyone talking about grabbing a woman’s pussy against her will or forcing himself on a woman.—Cornelio Nouel

The first job I ever had, at 17, I was fired because I wouldn’t have sex with the boss. And the 2nd. Most women I know have these stories.—Connie Reynolds